Football in Cameroon: A vehicle for the expansion and contraction of identity

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Football in Cameroon: Avehicle for the expansionand contraction of identityBea Vidacs aa City University , New York Graduate CenterPublished online: 18 Apr 2007.

To cite this article: Bea Vidacs (1999) Football in Cameroon: A vehicle for theexpansion and contraction of identity, Culture, Sport, Society, 2:3, 100-117,DOI: 10.1080/14610989908721848

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Football in Cameroon:A Vehicle for the Expansion and

Contraction of Identity

BEA VIDACS

INTRODUCTION: A DAY AT THE STADIUM

We are at the Ahmadou Ahidjo Stadium of Yaounde, Cameroon on 22June 1997 immediately following Cameroon's disappointing tie againstGabon as part of the qualifying rounds for the African Nations' CupFinals. Cameroon has done rather badly in the match. After trailing by2-0 and then 2-1, at the last minute Gabon managed to score anequalizing goal, leaving Cameroon's qualification for Ouagadougou indoubt.

As a dispirited Cameroonian team and a jubilant Gabonese team areleaving the stadium, a corpulent older man comes up to me and mycompanion, a Cameroonian coach, in great agitation. He starts by sayingthat he is very angry. He then pointedly remarks that he is angry at theSecond Vice President of the FECAFOOT, the football federation,because the latter had prohibited a man, wearing a bishop's hat, abishop's staff and a white robe sporting the green-red-yellow of theCameroonian flag, from encircling the stadium during half-time. In factthe 'bishop' is a familiar figure at all international matches at theYaounde stadium. In excited tones our friend exclaims, 'It's theBamileke, always the Bamileke!' ('Ce sont les Bamilekes, toujours lesBamilekes'). He goes on to explain that, had he been allowed to proceed,the bishop would have protected the national team, and that he (ourspeaker) had been told that the result was going to be 2-0, and wouldstay that way. 'It's impossible that every time there is an internationalmatch the Bamileke betray us. Because the bishop would have protectedus, but Colonel Tchatchou didn't let him.'

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Football in Cameroon 101

CAMEROON'S ETHNIC MAKE-UP: THE BAMILEKE-BETIQUARREL

In order to understand the deeper meaning of these accusations, I shouldexplain first of all that Cameroon is a multiethnic nation where there areupwards of 200 ethnic groups and the Bamileke are one of the largest ofthese. The FECAFOOT official in question is a Bamileke whereas thespeaker himself is a Beti, which is a collective name for people of thesouth, and from whose ranks Paul Biya, the president of Cameroon,hails.

Cameroon's triple colonial heritage is unique. The country was firstcolonized by the Germans (1884-1916). Following the First World War,the former German colony became a League of Nations trusteeshipadministered by the British and the French, dividing the territory intoBritish and French Cameroon. The West province referred to in thepresent essay as the 'homeland' of the Bamileke belonged to the Frenchadministered territory. The people of the southern half of former BritishCameroon voted to rejoin French Cameroon (East) just beforeindependence, whereas the northern half voted to join Nigeria. As aresult of the British colonial legacy, an English-speaking minority (about20-25 per cent of Cameroon's population) came into being which hasdeveloped a separate 'ethnic' identity as 'Anglophones'. They mostly livein the present North-West and South-West provinces. Thisidentification as 'Anglophone' overrides other ethnic divisions amongthem and, in many instances, sets them apart from the French-speakingmajority of the country. Other major divisions within Cameroon arebetween the Muslim north and the Christian south.

The Bamileke originate in the West Province, but have also migratedand settled widely all over Cameroon. They are seen by many ascontrolling the economy of the country. Indeed, because of theireconomic dynamism, they are resented by many people in Cameroon,and the phrase 'the Jews of Cameroon' has been used about them indebates. Although the phrase obviously compounds stereotypes, it doesindicate the nature of the structural position of the Bamileke inCameroon, and the kinds of prejudices they face. In addition, theBamileke are in political opposition to the current political regime. Theyare not the only ones. Cameroon's Anglophone minority was in theforefront of initiating multipartyism. In fact, Cameroon's mostimportant opposition leader, Ni John Fru Ndi, is an Anglophone. There

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102 Football Culture

are prominent opposition figures among the Beti as well, but certainlythe Bamileke are perceived by Cameroonians as being among the moststaunch critics of the current regime.

Like many other ethnic groups in Africa, the Bamileke have beenconstructed as a group as a result of colonization.1 The term Bamilekeunites a number of groups from Cameroon's Grassfields who live inhighly hierarchical societies. However, these are fairly independent unitswhich do not really constitute a centralized whole.

The Beti as a group are of even more recent origin, consisting ofethnic groups which, until recently, were seen as separate entities(Ewondo, Boulou, Eton, and so on) and the word Beti was originally alinguistic term describing the interrelated languages of these variousgroups. Their emergence under the collective name Beti dates to the1982 rise to power of Paul Biya, who is a Boulou. Traditionally, thesesocieties of the southern forest region of Cameroon were small,autonomous acephalous societies, with very little sense of commonality.

In recent years, Biya's regime has increasingly tried to put more andmore administrative power into Beti hands, and in the ethnic charges andcountercharges that are now rife in Cameroon both groups accuse eachother of ruining the country. The Bamileke see the Beti as being lazy andusing their closeness to power to enrich themselves at the expense of thecountry, while the Beti accuse the Bamileke of likewise enrichingthemselves and disregarding the needs of the country. The relationshipof the two groups has become increasingly bitterly antagonistic over thepast couple of years since the beginning of multipartyism in Cameroon inthe early 1990s, and P. Geschiere,2 following J. Lonsdale,3 hascharacterized it as an example of 'political tribalism'.

THE PLACE OF FOOTBALL IN CAMEROONIAN SPORT

Football is the most important sport in Cameroon. People refer to it as'sport roi' (literally the 'king sport', meaning the most important sport)and it animates their feelings in many ways. As most men have played itin childhood, and often in their teens and early manhood, it is a gameeverybody claims to understand, and thus have an interest in. Also, giventhe proliferation of teams of various levels, a very large number of peoplehave taken an active part in football, both as players and as managers orofficials of some sort. Everywhere in Yaounde, where there is a teamplaying there will be spectators as well, no matter how impromptu the

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team is. People even stop to watch children play, and often comment thatthey like to see children play because they play a more original andinteresting kind of football.

Thus, it is not surprising that sport news is dominated by football.For example, the popular Sport Matin programme on the radio, whichbroadcasts every morning, is almost entirely composed of football-related news and announcements, and other sports will be mentionedonly rarely, usually on account of a good home performance in aninternational competition. The same can be said about the sports pagesof newspapers appearing in Cameroon. They too are dominated byfootball news. For example, a quick overview of the first 21 issues of theweekly paper Generation* shows the following coverage during anapproximately five-month period: in the sports section there were 36longer features dealing with sport, of which 28 dealt with football; therewere also 27 shorter articles, usually less than ten lines long, and of these15 covered football; while 12 dealt with other sports. In addition, therewere 11 further articles about football outside the sports section, six ofthese in one issue of the paper,5 where the investigative central themewas the much debated collection for the Indomitable Lions for the 1994World Cup.6 No other sport merits mention outside the sports section.Generation is a paper of the Cameroonian intelligentsia opposed to thecurrent political regime, and is the most intellectual of all theCameroonian newspapers. It combines investigative journalism andserious social analysis with bourgeois general interest articles. ChallengeSport, a weekly paper devoted entirely to sport, also shows anoverwhelming interest in football. The issue of 28 March 1995, forexample, devotes approximately nine pages out of 12 to the sport.7

We can see that the coverage of football in Cameroon is extensive,becoming almost exclusive during an event such as the World Cup. Thenational radio (CRTV) devoted five and a half hours daily to the 1994World Cup, besides covering the matches and providing football-relatednews coverage under the regular news. This is without counting thespecial football-related programming of provincial stations. During the1994 World Cup, as part of this coverage, CRTV ran a call-in radioprogramme, Bonjour VAmerique, and its English-language counterpart,Hi America, which was supposed to rally Cameroonians to support theirteam. In the event of Cameroon's early elimination from the World Cup,it also served as a safety valve to allow Cameroonians to express theirbitterness and frustration at their poor performance.8

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BRIEF HISTORY, AND THE OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIALORGANIZATION OF FOOTBALL IN CAMEROON

Football, according to S. Tsanga,9 was introduced in Douala in the 1920sby African migrants, and quickly spread to Cameroonians. As elsewherein Africa, and in the colonial world in general, the colonizers attemptedto exclude the 'natives' from playing against them, and thus several earlyclubs had a European and an 'indigenous' team.10

The first Cameroonian teams evolved in Douala and Yaounde,respectively, the economic and political capitals of the country, and untilrecently these two towns remained the centres of the sport. This,however, seems to be changing, as some Western Cameroonian and otherprovincial teams gain more and more prominence. At first these teamswere recruited on a strictly ethnic basis, and as Clignet and Stark"demonstrate, this went to the point that transfers of players to ethnicallydifferent teams were regarded as betrayal. These days this is lessimportant, as players and coaches are fairly mobile, but the supporterbase and the managers and officials of most teams remain ethnicallydetermined, although, especially in the case of the more prestigiousteams such as Tonnerre, Canon and Union de Douala, they draw on awider set of supporters than the merely ethnic.

In the English-speaking Western part of the country (North-Westand South-West Provinces) which was under British colonial rule until1961, football had a somewhat different history, because there the mostimportant teams became those sponsored by various 'corporations andgovernmental agencies'.12 Even today, PWD Bamenda (Public WorksDepartment Bamenda) is the foremost team of the AnglophoneNorthwest Province.

The formation of the Cameroonian football federation(FECAFOOT) followed in 1959, just before independence, and it joinedFIFA in 1962. Cameroon has been participating in international footballever since, won the African Nations Cup twice (1984, 1988), and hasparticipated in four World Cups (1982, 1990, 1994, 1998). In 1990, theIndomitable Lions, the national team, created a sensation in the WorldCup by reaching the quarterfinals, and defeating Argentina, the holdersof the title, on the way.13

The structure of official Cameroonian football is as follows. There isa first division where 16 teams compete from all over the nationalterritory. Each of Cameroon's ten provinces organizes second division

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championships, the champions of which vie for the three places thatbecome vacant in the first division through the ''Interpoules' competition,which traditionally has been held in Yaounde and Douala, although inrecent years there have been some attempts to move Interpoules to otherparts of the country. For example, in 1994 they were held in the regionaltowns of Bamenda and Bafoussam; and although in 1995 they were backin Douala and Yaounde, they have been alternating among variousprovincial towns, so that in 1998 they were held in Ebolowa and Buea. Inaddition, there is also the third division or Ha ligue\ where teamscompete at the departmental or district level. In theory there is also a'championnat de corpos et veterans' (championship of corporations andveterans) organized by the FECAFOOT, but these tend not to functionvery well, even though both corporations and veterans do play all overYaounde, and presumably elsewhere too.

There is also the Cup of Cameroon for which all teams of all threedivisions compete. The final of the Cup of Cameroon is a much awaitedfestive event where the President of Cameroon always appears to providefurther pomp to the proceedings by his presence. The fact that he neverfails to attend the Cup final is a reminder that the state in general, andthe President in particular, take football very seriously. The President isthe one who hands over the Cup and he personally congratulates theplayers. There is also a championship in women's football, as well as thewomen's version of the Cup of Cameroon, but most female teams arelocated in Yaounde and Douala, and the female version of the sport isnot yet practised very widely.14

In addition to these official forms of football, there are many otherways in which football structures Cameroonians' spare time andinterests. There are the lchampionnats de vacances1, organized in schoolholidays, sometimes referred to as lles interquartiers1', where variousneighbourhoods of Yaounde hold mini-championships. In addition,there are the '2-0', the 'old boys' teams', and village championships,which will be discussed later.

ETHNICITY AND FOOTBALL

As mentioned above, the ethnic component has not disappeared inCameroonian football, and in fact on lower levels of the competition andespecially outside the official system of national championships, thereare many instances of ethnicity being the driving principle of football.

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Village championships, organized by migrants bringing together membersof the village in town, are an important addition or alternative totraditional village meetings. The expressed goals are to 'animate' and allowthe town-born young members of the village to get acquainted with eachother. I observed the village championship of the Bamendjoun, a Bamilekechiefdom, over a six-month period in 1995. The Bamendjoun grouping{groupement) consists of six villages and are united under the leadership ofa chief. The six villages organized a football championship and a cupcompetition in Yaounde. The most important criterion for playing in oneof the six teams was that the players had to be a descendant of the village,either paternally or maternally. Some of the players were also activelyplaying in 'official' teams (sometimes in the second, but usually in thethird division) and therefore teams that fielded more 'professionals' had anintrinsic advantage. As a result, it became important to scrutinize theorigins of the players. I have witnessed debates about the legality of acertain player on a team, including calling for elderly witnesses. Becausethe witnesses then explain how the player can be considered a member ofthe village, such disputes also lead to revisions and relearning oftraditional ways of reckoning kinship.

The organization of the championship was along official lines, somuch so that the various forms and administrative details followedclosely those of official football. The referees, too, were active referees ofthe second and third division. The organizers of the championshipvolunteered their time and, apart from the president and treasurer,consisted mostly of the players themselves. The matches I observedwere a community event, 100-300 people attended them and, unlike atthe official championships, the number of women present almostequalled the number of men. This is a clear indication of the communitynature of these events. Unfortunately, this village championship hasstopped functioning because of controversies over the handling ofmoney that came in at the post-cup gala. One of the organizers remarkedto me that it was a pity because the championship had become like a postoffice for the village: everyone knew where to go to find everybody.

Village championships also take place locally, when youngsterswho regularly arrive 'home' for the summer holidays are organizedto participate in impromptu championships all over Cameroon. Thisis so widespread that many 'official' teams have difficulty holdingon to their players during the summer holidays as youngsters disappearinto the villages.

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Despite the continued importance of ethnicity in football and thus itsrole in maintaining ethnic distinctions and boundaries, it is alsoundoubtedly leading to a crossing of boundaries on the level of theeveryday practice of the sport. Not only does football create non-traditional standards of behaviour, such as a new notion of time, or aturning upside down of patterns of respect (e.g. age v. youth), but also,and most importantly, it creates linkages among people who would nototherwise be linked.15 In the course of a sporting career, football playerscome into contact with a great many people from all walks of life. Asplayers, they often play on multi-ethnic teams and, even when they playon a team that is ethnic, that is to say its supporters and leadership areidentified with a single ethnic group, the players themselves will comefrom a variety of ethnic groups. This is because, despite ethnicity, teamsand especially coaches, who do much of the recruiting, are often willingto find the best players regardless of ethnic origin. The average footballplayer will have played in at least three or four teams and the ethnic mixhe will have been exposed to is far larger than would be the case were henot playing football. In addition, teams, especially in the first division,but even at lower levels of competition, often play official and unofficialmatches outside their regular milieu and inevitably will make contactwith coaches and players from other teams and other ethnic groups. InYaounde, players often recruit each other and, interestingly, in manycases they will not be of the same ethnic group.

RELATIONSHIPS BEYOND FOOTBALL

Football creates relationships which endure beyond an active career. Muchof the human structure of Cameroonian football is made up of formerplayers, so much so that the innumerable more or less volunteer coaches,the officials of the federation and the referees for the most part have playedfootball in their youth, and all seem to know each other as former teammates, coaches and players. This leads to a complicated set of alliances,which do not necessarily conform to the rules of ethnic exclusivity.

Then there is the '2-0', which is an institution in itself, unitingformer players in recreational football. These matches consist of the oldboys' teams, which play on weekends. The name '2-0' originates in thepractice (dictated by having too many would-be players), of having twoteams play until one of them leads by two goals, at which point the losingteam will yield its place to those still waiting to play.

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The '2-0' team, of which I was an honorary member, contained therepresentatives of at least six ethnic groups and the friendships thatdeveloped were very far from being ethnically determined. The team,AMIAF, constituted what could be seen as a voluntary association, butinstead of the ethnic homogeneity characteristic of many urban Africanvoluntary associations it consisted of a variety of ethnic groups. Amongthe noticeable interethnic friendships was that between a Bamileke and aBassa; the two were practically inseparable. If you saw one of them youcould be sure that the other was not far away. The former had been thecoach of the latter. Another, for some time inseparable, pair was aBamileke and a Douala. The former had his own young team and thelatter for a while was its only supporter. Supporter here means turningup for training sessions, providing advice and financial support.

Another man on the team, a former second division player who isBamileke, started his career in a team in Douala and played not in aBamileke team in Yaounde but in a Beti team of Sangmelima, a nearbytown. He describes his experience with football as something that helpedhim establish himself in his career as a carpenter because, instead ofmoney, he asked the leadership of his Sangmelima team to provide himwith contacts for job orders. At present he does most of his work for agovernment company which sells goods to government employees oncredit. This ensures that he has a steady source of income, which in thecurrent economic climate of Cameroon is especially important. Hisaccess to the company's store is through a Bassa member of the old boys'team, and he faced great difficulties getting paid for his delivery whenhis team member was on summer leave. Incidentally, this carpenter wasalso instrumental in organizing the village championship mentionedabove. Thus, being ethnic and co-operating across ethnic lines are notnecessarily contradictory.

THE NATIONAL TEAM

While football is an important vehicle for the maintenance andcontinuation of ethnic identities and differences, it is just as importantin the creation of national identities and national distinctiveness.Cameroonians support the national team even when, fearing that thegovernment is going to take advantage of victories, they resent football.The government in fact does try to do this whenever possible. Forexample, the victorious performance of the national team in Italy in 1990

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went a long way to calm Cameroon's turbulent political climate in thewake of the country's transition to multiparty politics. Paul Biya has doneeverything to appropriate the image of the Lions in order to claim theirvictories for himself. Among other forms this appropriation has taken areelection campaign posters, a postage stamp showing him with a footballand the image of a lion, and having a popular football player endorse himin election advertisements. These attempts were only partly successful,however, because, even though Biya managed to maintain his hold onpower, his attempts to usurp the success of the Lions has earned him theridicule of a large part of the population and, after the national team's1994 World Cup fiasco the government, despite all efforts to deflect thecensure for the defeat, got blamed by most people.16 Interestingly, thegovernment handled the 1998 World Cup much better, and whenCameroon was eliminated, to a large extent as a result of questionablerefereeing, the government managed to turn the event to its advantage, bymaking it look like a victory, 'stolen' by the Hungarian referee. Eventhough in the latter case the Cameroonian people found themselves onthe same side as their government, some opposition papers were quick topoint out that this incident should show everyone (including andespecially the government) how bad it felt to have a clear victory snatchedaway, making a clear reference to the 1992 presidential elections where,according to the opposition, John Fru Ndi's victory was 'stolen' by Biya."In any case, in the heat of the moment, when actually watching aninternational match where Cameroon is playing, people root for thenational team, and derive great pride from the exploits of the Lions.

Cameroonians themselves recognize that the national team bringsunity and holds them together. As one caller to Bonjour VAmeriqueexpressed it during the 1994 World Cup 'football is the only thing thatunites practically all Cameroonians'.18 This sentiment was often echoedboth in Bonjour VAmerique and my interviews.

A Bonjour VAmerique listener, who had gone to the studio in person,said the following just before Cameroon played Russia, its last remainingmatch in the first round of the 1994 World Cup:

I myself would say that no matter who plays, that the people know,that the people who are in the United States know, that theCameroonians have done all ... have done all, didn't they ... toshow, that they love their national team. Well, no matter who plays,that he should play thinking ... that he should play Wednesday

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thinking of the fact that we ... that we count on this team, we counton it because it is a question of national pride, we count on it thatthe remainder of the competition should go very well and if lateron we leave [the competition] that we leave it honourably."

His comments were in part addressing the ever-present question ofbonuses, and the effort Cameroonians made through the Coup de Coeur,the nationwide collection set up to help the Lions before the World Cup.In part he was reacting to the news of dissent among the team membersregarding who would play. But what is really significant is his sentimentthat the team should uphold the honour of the nation.

Another caller, this time an Anglophone man, was also keeping thehonour of the nation in mind:

Yes, I think I am a football fan and I have been trying to watch allthe matches that are ... that are played and really football bringshonour to a nation. If you look inside Africa you'll find thatCameroon is being honoured by most African countries and whynot Europe, European countries, because of the performance in1990.20

In fact, what people lamented most about Cameroon's first roundelimination was that Cameroon's prestigious image, gained in 1990, hadbeen lost. When listening to these statements it is hard not to realize thatthe national team elicits nationalist sentiments in Cameroonians.

NATIONALISM AND SPORT: THE SIMULTANEOUS MOMENTAND THE IMAGINED COMMUNITY

Sport is the vehicle par excellence for national sentiments. Given the wayinternational competitions are organized, it is nations, however defined,that are pitted against each other, and such structures have a way ofimposing themselves on the popular imagination. With the advance ofmass media into quite remote areas, the simultaneous moment, aboutwhich Benedict Anderson is so eloquent, regarding the relationshipbetween the novel and the rise of nationalism in Europe and elsewhere,is particularly evident when the majority of the population of an entirecountry is able to watch a football match at the same time.21 Add to thisthat in Cameroon, and in Africa in general, the majority of thesespectators are literally watching the match together because in

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Cameroon, for example, most people watch international matches not intheir living rooms with their immediate, nuclear families, but in publicspaces: bars, for the most part, where for the price of a few beers peopleunrelated to each other gather to watch matches. In fact, even if they arewatching at home, chances are that there will be neighbours, relatives,servants or friends availing themselves of the opportunity to watch thematch, thus once again the event is more public than one would expect.There are also giant screens set up in large cities where hundreds ofpeople can and do gather together to watch a match. There aresimultaneous radio broadcasts of international matches as well, so evenpeople in remote areas can follow the competition, again usually inpublic rather than in private, as not everyone owns a radio. So theimagined community is rejoicing and seething, literally all at once, andof course it is both real (in the immediate sense) and imagined in theAndersonian sense, because people in their immediate communitiesknow that there are other immediate communities of the same kindexperiencing what they are experiencing. They know this for no otherreason than because, the day after the match, the radio will broadcastman-on-the-street reactions to the match from all ten provinces ofCameroon. D. Spitulnik,22 analysing radio in Zambia, also sees thebroadcast of international football matches as one of the main instanceswhere Zambian national identity is articulated, with football serving asan effective rallying cry for national unity.

To extend Anderson's thesis on the rise of nationalism, football is amajor force in imagining the nation. This is not only so in the aboveoutlined scenario of imagining the nation through the communalexperience of watching and rooting for the national team; it is alsoevident in the very structure of the national championship and the Cupof Cameroon which helps make the abstraction of Cameroon as an idea,as a unit, real in the minds of the people. Although this structure is notso different from the rest of the world's, its significance in terms of theimagined community of the nation is not to be ignored.

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISMIN AFRICAN SPORT

What is really striking about our stadium friend's explanation of theIndomitable Lions' disappointing performance is that it highlights anoften neglected aspect of the influence football plays on the relationship

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between ethnicity and nationalism in Cameroon, and I suspect elsewherein Africa too. And that is that sport, and especially football, incites theloyalties of people on different levels so that they can act to promotenational as well as ethnic sentiments.

Much of the rather sparse literature on sport in Africa seems to denythat it has national integrative functions, although such functions havebeen amply illustrated elsewhere, especially in Europe.23 Rather, theemphasis has been on the divisive aspect of sport, which brings out the'ethnic' in Africans.24

Similarly, in the anthropological literature of the past 30 years,ethnicity is seen as the most important dividing line in Africa. There hasbeen an almost rigid division, more often than not unacknowledged,where Africans are seen as ethnics, and Westerners as nationalists. Yetethnicity and nationalism are not the mutually exclusive categories beingpresented. In analysing ethnicity, anthropologists have come to describeethnicity as situational and flexible.25 Ronald Cohen defines ethnicity 'asa series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness...' where'... the cultural identifiers used to assign persons to groupings... expand or contract in inverse relation to the scale of inclusiveness andexclusiveness of the membership'.26

There is an argument for adding nationalism as one more of theseflexible and situational identities, an alternative that can be chosen atcertain times from among other identities. The various alternativesneed not be consonant with each other. This makes sense also becauseof the segmentary nature of sports competition. When lower levelteams are opposed to each other the identities that come to the fore arelocal identities, when higher level teams are opposed to each other theinclusiveness and scope of the identities evoked match the level of thecompetition, and this allows for, or even invites, these 'nested'identities.

Thus, at issue is not so much whether sport is promoting unity ordivisiveness. It clearly does both. In Africa it even goes beyondnationalism in promoting even more overarching, pan-Africanidentifications. For example, after Cameroon's stellar showing in the1990 World Cup, jfeune Afrique" in a band headline cutting diagonallyacross the lower right corner on its title page said 'Africa among thegreat', referring to Cameroon's and Egypt's showing at the World Cup.A few weeks later, upon the conclusion of the competition, which ofcourse had been won by Germany, the Jeune Afrique2* headline declared

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'It is Cameroon that Won!' - in handwritten block letters superimposedover the photograph of a stadium covering the entire front page.

Certainly in 1994, after Cameroon was eliminated from thecompetition, Cameroonians were quick to shift their allegiance toNigeria, the only remaining African side in the competition. Manybought the Nigerian flags being sold in Yaounde on the night ofNigeria's match against Italy. When Nigeria lost the match aFrancophone Cameroonian friend told me the next morning that he hadbeen so upset that he almost cried. This is despite the fact thatCameroon has had a continuing border dispute with Nigeria over theBakassi peninsula. The dispute is closer to the hearts of the governmentthan the people at large. Nevertheless Cameroonians on the whole areconvinced that they can beat Nigeria in football any time.

How easily this identification is made, and how one African countryis made to stand for the whole of Africa, is shown by the followingstatement by a woman caller to the English version of the call-in radioprogramme, the day of the Nigeria-Italy match: 'Well, to start off theNigerian side showed up a good game and I am sure they defended the... the African nation as a whole and all I can wish them that they shouldkeep on and try to, at least fly the flag ofNi.... Africa. ... I hope [they]will attend may be even the semi-finals.'29 The ease with which she treatsNigeria and Africa as interchangeable terms shows that she sees the goodperformance of Nigeria as holding up the honour of Africa as a whole.Given that by this time Cameroon had already been eliminated, she likemany others is now rooting for Nigeria as the African team, hoping thatthey will go far in the competition. One could object that Europeans donot automatically support the next European team when their own haslost, but shifting of loyalties in such a case is a question of powerrelationships, where such switches are facilitated by Africans' perceptionof a commonality of fate vis-d-vis Europe, which is of course the productof their colonial history, of being dominated and exploited by Europeand the continuing structurally weak position that African countriesshare in relation to Europe and the United States today.

This line of argument follows to some extent what J. Lever30 has tosay about the interplay of the unifying and divisive functions of footballin Brazil. I agree with her that football is capable of both uniting anddividing people, however, while she sees this as paradoxical, I regard itas an outcome of the segmentary nature of the game's organization. Atthe same time I include nationalist and pan-Africanist (as well as ethnic)

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sentiments in the framework of co-existing and available identitychoices, where the scope of inclusiveness will be triggered, and to a greatextent determined, in relation to situation.

To what extent it will be 'determined' seems to depend on the levelat which we find ourselves. That is to say, Cameroonians followed thissystem of increasingly widening nesting identifications throughout the1994 World Cup to the point where, in the final, the majority supportedBrazil against Italy, on the grounds that 'Brazil is a third world country,like Cameroon' and possibly also because there are blacks on theBrazilian team.31 However, at this level of inclusiveness the identificationwas much less binding, and a minority felt perfectly at ease supportingItaly, whereas it is unlikely that it would have been possible to supportItaly against Nigeria openly.

J. Arbena32 objects to Lever's analysis on the grounds thatconceivably watching international football, a 'global game', could workto wash away not only ethnic, but also nationalist divisions, as he puts it,'in favour of a greater sense of transnational community, if only througha sense of shared experiences and the consequences of operating withinsimilar institutions and regulations'.33 Arbena's argument that football inand of itself does not uphold governments, and that the gains inpopularity of regimes and leaders is only momentary, is well taken, butmy point here is on a different level. In this proposed framework ofnested identities, pan-Africanism today does not make nationalist orethnic sentiment impossible tomorrow or even the next minute, as can beseen from the contribution of the woman caller quoted above. Nor doesnationalist sentiment exclude ethnic sentiment (and vice versa) asevidenced by our friend's statement at the stadium.

Put somewhat differently, in all the debates about ethnicity andnationalism, little attention has been paid to nationalism in areas,especially Africa, where we are not expecting to see it. In a 1996 volumeon African ethnicity, Fardon,34 for example, devotes only one paragraphto nationalism in his conclusion to a highly imaginative analysis of theconstraints imposed on 'ethnic narratives' by their respective interethniccontexts. As an aside (actually, in brackets) he mentions that nationalismshould be evident in Africa, if at all, on the level of organized sports.3S

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NATIONALISM AND ETHNICITY: TWO SIDES OFTHE SAME COIN

To return to our stadium interlocutor, he is being ethnic and nationalistat the same time. His very presence at the stadium is an indication thathis interest in football goes beyond the purely ethnic. Presumablysomeone with an ethnic interest in football would go to the stadium onlywhen his ethnic team plays. I happen to know this man and know that heis present at every match played at the stadium, but there are many otherpeople who only turn out for the matches played by their own team, andthat often happens to be an ethnic team. His fervent need to find anexplanation for the result is also proof of his national sentiments. Yet theexegesis he chooses to present, apart from its magical undertones, ispurely ethnic. He singles out an individual, who, even if the story of hisconstraining the bishop is true (about which I have no information), wasonly doing his duty, presiding over the peaceful unfolding of the match.And, in addition to blaming the Colonel for the result, he jumps fromhim (an individual) to his ethnic group and generalizes that the entiregroup is always trying to sabotage Cameroonian success in allinternational matches. The point is that in one breath our man is beingboth a nationalist and an ethnic chauvinist, questioning the patriotism ofgroups other than his own in a way that also involves questioning whoexactly constitutes the nation.

Many of the contributions to the radio programme, BonjourI'Amerique, bear witness to the fact that indeed football on theinternational level elicits from Cameroonians the same kind ofnationalist fervour as we are used to elsewhere. In many of myinterviews, the majority of interviewees predictably supported their ownethnic teams, but at the same time they also supported the national team.Often what we find is that people go to matches only when their teamplays and when the national team plays. This is no different from anyEuropean fan who will support his own team (chosen on whatever basis)and the national team, and no one sees any contradiction in this.Cameroonians act in exactly the same way and we are surprised becausewe supposed them to be ethnic to the exclusion of all else.

What they debate is the definition of the nation, who is a true patriot,who is betraying us. And this is where nationalism, the 'unifying force',becomes divisive, in denying other people's intentions to uphold thehonour of the nation.36 This essay has demonstrated that football is a

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two-edged sword and, while it can be both ethnic and nationalist, evenwhen it is nationalist it can be divisive.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, football in Cameroon both reinforces ethnic ties and cutsacross them. Whether it does one or the other will vary contextually:people do support their local 'ethnic' teams, but in the same breath alsosupport the national team. What they contest is whether everyonesupports the national team to the same extent and, by implication,whether everybody deserves to be part of the nation. At the same time,through the experience of football as a practice, people gain a widersocial network which cuts across ethnic links and binds them together innovel ways.

NOTES

The fieldwork for the research on which this study is based was supported by the Wenner-GrenFoundation for Anthropological Research. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1997Annual Meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sports.

1. See P. Geschiere, 'Kinship, Witchcraft and the Moral Economy of Ethnicity: Contrasts fromSouthern and Western Cameroon', in L. de la Gorgendiere, K. King and S. Vaughan (eds.),Ethnicity in Africa: Roots, Meanings and Implications (Edinburgh, 1996), for a discussion of theconstructed nature of the two groups and the differences in the way in which they cope withnew inequalities in their midst.

2. Ibid.3. J. Lonsdale, 'The Moral Economy of Mau-Mau', in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (eds.),

Unhappy Valley, Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London, 1992).4. Generation, Yaounde (August 1994 to early January 1995), that is to say at the tail end of the

1994 World Cup.5. Ibid., I, 17, 12 December 1994.6. For more detail on the Coup de Cceur see P. N. Nkwi and B. Vidacs, 'Football: Politics and

Power in Cameroon' (hereafter 'Football'), in G. Armstrong and R. Giulianotti (eds.), Enteringthe Field: New Perspectives in World Football (Oxford, 1997).

7. Challenge Sport (Yaounde) II, 61.8. For a more detailed analysis of the programme and changes in its tenor see 'Football'.9. S. Tsanga, Le Football camerounais des origines a ['independence (Yaounde, 1969) (hereafter Le

Football).10. See W. J. Baker and J. A. Mangan, Sport in Africa, Essays in Social History (London, 1987);

Laura Fair, 'Kickin it: Leisure, Politics and Football in Colonial Zanzibar, 1900s-1950s', Africa,67 (1997); P. Martin, 'Colonialism, Youth and Football in French Equatorial Africa',International Journal of the History of Sport, 8 (1991); B. Stoddart, 'Sport, CulturalImperialism, and Colonial Response in the British Empire', Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 30 (1988); Le Football (Yaounde, 1969).

11. R. Clignet and M. Stark, 'Modernisation and Football in Cameroun', Journal of ModernAfrican Studies, 12(1974).

12. H. M. Mokeba, 'The Politics and Diplomacy of Cameroon Sports: A Study in the Quest for

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Nation-building and International Prestige' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of SouthCarolina, 1989); see also 'Modernisation and Football in Cameroun'.

13. J.-C. Kodo-Ela and A. M. Masika, // etait une fois ... les Lions Indomptables du Cameroun(Yaounde, nd) Collection Hommes et Evenements.

14. . Kuper, Football against the Enemy (London, 1994).15. 'Modernisation and Football in Cameroun'.16. See 'Football' for further details of how the government is trying to take advantage of football

victories.17. La Nouvelle Expression, 381, 26 June 1998, 618. Bonjour I'Amerique, 27 June 1994, 719. Bonjour VAmerique, 28 June 1994, 120. //<^wmV«,2Julyl994,721. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983).22. D. A. Spitulnik, 'Radio Culture in Zambia: Audiences, Public Words, and the Nation State (I

and II)' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Chicago, 1994).23. J. Hargreaves, Sport, Power and Culture: A Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in

Britain (New York, 1986); J.A. Mangan (ed.), Tribal Identities: Nationalism, Europe, Sport(London, 1996) (hereafter Tribal Identities);]. A. Mangan, Richard Holt and Pierre Lanfranchi(eds.), European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport (London, 1996).

24. T. Monnington, 'The Politics of Black African Sport', in Lincoln Allison (ed.), The Politics ofSport (Manchester, 1986); T. B. Stevenson, 'Sports Clubs and Political Integration in theYemen Arab Republic', International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 24 (1989).

25. J. Vincent, 'The Structuring of Ethnicity', Human Organization, 33 (1974); R. Cohen,'Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology', Annual Review of Anthropology, 7 (1978).

26. Ibid., 387, emphasis in the original.27. JeuneAfrique 1538, 20-26 Junel990.28. JeuneAfrique 1541, 11-17 July 1990.29. Hi America, 2 July 1994, 7, emphasis added.30. J. Lever, Soccer Madness (Chicago, 1983). As she puts it 'Sport's paradoxical ability to reinforce

societal cleavages while transcending them makes soccer ... the perfect means of achieving amore perfect union between multiple groups', ibid., p.7. In the case of Cameroon it isimpossible to share this optimism; the processes I am talking about are much moreindeterminate.

31. I have not heard the latter explicitly stated in the case of the World Cup final, but judging bythe commentary and keen interest with which Cameroonians scrutinized the racial compositionof foreign teams, it is more than likely that this factor played a part in the ready identificationof many Cameroonians with Brazil. To give an example of this kind of scrutiny, there weremany jocular comments on why Saudi Arabia was considered an Asian team in the World Cup,when clearly many of their players were black.

32. J. L. Arbena, 'Nationalism and Sport in Latin America, 1850-1990: The Paradox of Promotingand Performing "European" Sports', in J.A. Mangan (ed.), Tribal Identities.

33. Ibid, p.225.34. R. Fardon, '"Crossed Destinies": the entangled histories of West African ethnic and national

identities', in L. de la Gorgendiere et al. (eds.), Ethnicity in Africa: Roots, Meanings andImplications.

35. Ibid., p.142.36. B. F. Williams, 'A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain',

Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1989).

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Documents

Football in Cameroon: A vehicle for the expansion and contraction of identity